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Specialized Discourses and Their Readerships pp 101–125Cite as

“Tetanus? Who Cares About Tetanus?”: Audience Engagement and Co-participation in Medical Blogs

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Part of the book series: The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series ((TMAKHLFLS))

Abstract

The paper aims to characterise the patterns of audience engagement and co-participation in medical blogs by healthcare practitioners. Following recent approaches to the study of online communication in healthcare contexts that emphasise the importance of the interpersonal aspect, the study uses discourse analysis to examine the interaction between healthcare practitioners and their diverse audiences. More specifically, the qualitative analysis of the data explores and illustrates in detail: (1) the audience engagement devices employed by the healthcare practitioners in the blog posts, and (2) the blogger-audience interaction in the comments sections of the blog. The findings reveal that healthcare practitioners effectively exploit the affordances of the blog to seek solidarity with their own professional group, but also to perform “ordinary expertise”, a dialogic expertise that is linked to the ordinariness of everyday conversations, and with which they aim to reach wider audiences, without having to depreciate their authority. The readers, on the other hand, use the comments sections for experience sharing and exchange of practical information. They search for the presence of like-minded individuals and extensively engage in recounting the experience that matches their needs and contributes to building trust and credibility.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All translations from Polish are mine and have been checked with a native speaker of English. Underlining in the extracts is used to mark the hyperlinks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland

    Małgorzata Sokół

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  1. Małgorzata Sokół
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Correspondence to Małgorzata Sokół .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France

    David Banks

  2. Facoltà di Lettere, Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli, Italy

    Emilia Di Martino

Appendix

Appendix

List of Blogs in the Corpus:

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Sokół, M. (2019). “Tetanus? Who Cares About Tetanus?”: Audience Engagement and Co-participation in Medical Blogs. In: Banks, D., Di Martino, E. (eds) Specialized Discourses and Their Readerships. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8157-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8157-7_6

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